Our Task

To design a site that is beautiful and represents their brand and their mission.  CARES  wanted to boost online donations, gain more advocates, encourage volunteerism, and have an online store all connected to a Content Management System (CMS).

Our Solution

We chose to build their new site on WordPress. This allowed a customizable CMS that moderately web savvy staff could use. It’s easy to use,  open-source, and has plenty of plug-ins for social media. We built their template from the ground up—taking our design, coding the front-end, and hooking it up with the back-end database.One part of our design was a nice, big, colorful “Donate” button to help generate online giving from the site’s visitors. The button links directly with CARES’ Paypal account.

However, getting funding and donations is one thing, but gaining voices to spread the message and getting folks to volunteer is another. To help CARES generate a grassroots effort  we connected the site to their Flickr account and Google calendar.  This allowed them to show off their new photos and keep their advocates in the loop with upcoming events.

Finally, CARES needed the ability to run an online store within their site.  So we beefed up the layout of their store using custom code snippets that have buttons linking directly to Paypal. We educated CARES staff through a series of online classes—led by Stalielife—so they could cut and paste the snippets and edit using WordPress’ basic functions.

The site has an overall robust feel from a simple easy-to-use blogging engine. The site helped sell out a benefit show of The Full Monty and has boosted volunteerism and involvement at all of their recent events.

View the site >

Identity: Bold and Playful

How do you create a new brand when the old brand is based on a childhood toy that the client loves?

To keep a personal approach (while creating a bold and recognizable identity), we created a silhouette of the iconic sewing machine toy and added a knitting needle to the baseline to promote her two areas of expertise. The rounded font is easy to read and playful, too.

Caro even liked out alts and went with the circle version for her store and (possible) future product logos.

Website Design: Fun and Informative

To reveal her new identity, Caro also wanted a website re-design. Originally, she just has a simple TypePad powered template that featured little customization. The new site was to be a CMS website where she could post thoughts, tutorials, showcase her products and interact with friends and clients. Our overall goal with the design was showcase a wide range of content on the home page without overwhelming a visitor.

To enable a more robust set of features, the new site is built in WordPress. (See our previous post about why we love WP.) We approached the design by utilizing a ‘magazine-style’ template called Arthemia.

This magazine style layout displays a main article with thumbnails for latest news, a small side bar with the latest product info, blurbs of the latest posts, category browsing, ad space, Social Media integration with Twitter and a widget-ready area for RSS feeds. The main Splityarn site linkes to her store, RSS feeds, info about Splityarn, and her full photo gallery from Flickr. (She’s an avid photographer.)

Store Design: Powered by Big Cartel

Splityarn uses BigCartel to power online shoping. This is our first time using BigCartel and we love it – you can create you own store, upload product photos and text, set discount codes, add sale and clearance items, manage inventory and you can customize one of their templates or design your own using their API. They help integrate with Paypal to process your order payments too.

Thanks, Caro. We can’t wait to watch your brand gain even more momentum.

Hal Measley, the Founder and President, had a smart idea for an in-browser audio class (the previous version relied on CPU-based players). Our initial assignment was to re-design and incorporate the new player. But we had some additional ideas we thought NLF would like.

For instance, we created a new product page design that uses best-in-class eCommerce tactics for easy purchase and sharing. We also refined the checkout process to make it more seamless. You’ll note a refined brand presence, too.

Our new design focuses on benefits first and includes an incredible amount of keywords for effective SEO.

The previous design worked hard but appeared dated.

We’d like to give special thanks to our everyday client contacts, Marcia Sholl and Sue Odenburg, for making the wesbite a true collaboration.